Email address

• The address is very important, as the user will use it to reset their password if they forget.
• Must be unique, no two users can share an email address
  • If you need to re-use an email, use the “plus trick” to add a suffix to it, by using the same email, but adding extra text before the @ sign.
  • E.g. If the email that needs two accounts is email@gmail.com, then for the second account, you could use email+second@gmail.com

Username/URL

• This is the “account name” they will type on the login form
• It is also the URL for their profile!
• This cannot be changed later!
  • If the username absolutely must be changed then you need to delete the old account and migrate all posts to a new one. See below for instructions.
• It can contain spaces, but not special characters like punctuation.
• Try to keep this simple, and emphasize to the user that it is permanent.

First Name/Last Name/Display Name

• By default the Display name used on publicly-visible pages is “Firstname Lastname”, but can also be set to a custom value using the Nickname field of the user profile, which will then be available as an option for Display name.
• These can easily be changed later, unlike the Username.

Role

• Learn about Roles on wordpress.org.
• Each user has a single “role” that defines how much access they have in the site.
• GV sites use a plugin to customize roles, adding new roles and re-configuring the default ones. This means you cannot assume roles will behave the same across all sites.
• If you are managing users for a site, you should know which roles are commonly used and for what.
• If you ever have questions, please talk to your manager or the GV Tech Lead if you are the highest administrator of your site.
• Here is a summary of the customized roles used on Global Voices English.
  • Holding: This user is disabled, usually because they are no longer active. They can't edit anything other than their profiles.
  • Author: Able to edit, but not publish their own posts. Can't edit posts where they aren't marked as an author unless they are subscribed via the Edit Flow box.
  • Editor: Able to edit and publish any post. Able to create and edit users. Able to edit only those pages where they are subscribed via Edit Flow.
  • Administrator: Full access to the site including configuration, themes, and plugins. Only administrators can or should create other administrators.

You can get to the “Edit User” screen for a user in two ways:

• Visit their public profile while logged in as a manager, then click the Edit User button in the dark menu bar at the top of the site.
• From wp-admin click on Users in the menu on the left, then search for the person you want to edit.

Creating a new user account

• Go to Users > Add new
• Fill in the fields with user information (see below) and click Add New User at the bottom
• The user should receive an email from WP with “Login Details” in the subject line, containing their username and links to set their password and log in.
• Now send an email directly to the individual, letting them know they should expect the email from WP where they can set their password and log in.
• If they don't get the automatic email, they should try looking in their spam, and you can also double-check their email in WP is correct.
• If you continue having problems, and they are unable to reset their password using the login screen, contact the Lingua Lead or Tech Lead for help.

Things to consider before deleting a user account:

• The URLs for the user will be dead-end 404 errors.
• Despite this, the pages will not be removed from the internet, as they have all been backed up on the Archive.org WayBack Machine.
• Because all GV content is licensed as Creative Commons, once it is published we have a permanent right to continue publishing it, regardless of the later decisions of the author.
• We do not delete the posts themselves, even if in extreme circumstances we may delete the user accounts that they were originally attributed to.
• Any published posts associated with the To-be-deleted account need to be re-assigned to a new Target account, so before deleting a user it is vital to come to a decision of which other account their posts will be assigned to.

Removing a WordPress user

• Prepare the replacement user account (Reassign-user) which will receive the posts previously held by the account that will be deleted (To-be-deleted-user)
• Open a new tab with the profile of the To-be-deleted-user showing their posts and leave it open. You will use it later to check that everything worked.
• Go to Users in the sidebar of wp-admin.
• Search for the To-be-deleted-user.
• Hover over their name and click the Delete button.
• In the subsequent screen, click the Assign all content to: radio button, then select the Reassign-user from the pulldown menu.
• Click Confirm Deletion and wait for the confirmation message.
• Use the open tab from before with the profile of the deleted user to review their posts and make sure that Reassign-user is correctly marked as the author.

Controlling the “Display Name”

To update a user's Display Name just edit their profile (steps above) and look for the Display Name setting. It allows you to pick a mix of the First Name, Last Name, or Nickname settings, which you can update as necessary.

Changing “Username” (account login) by creating a new user and migrating all content

• Confirm with the individual their new permanent Username, with the understanding that it cannot be changed again.
• Update the old account to have a different email address, so that you can use their true email (which must be unique) for the new account
  • Usually it's best to use the “plus trick” to create a unique version of their true email
  • If their address was email@gmail.com, then you'd update the old account to have  email+old@gmail.com, which would still send mail to their address, but WordPress would see it as a different email.
• Create the new account for them, following the instructions in Adding Users above
• Transfer all posts to the new account, following the instructions above for Removing Users.